The most destructive earthquake in Santa Barbara history, and the first destructive earthquake since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, occurred on June 29, 1925, converting much of the town to heaps of rubble. While the quake's epicenter was centered on an undetermined fault offshore, most of the damage came about due to two strong aftershocks which occurred onshore and five minutes apart. The intensity on the Modified Mercalli scale was determined to be 8.0 for the coast from Goleta, through Santa Barbara, and to Carpinteria.
The low death toll (13 or 14) is credited to its early hour, 6:23 a.m., before most people were in the streets at risk from falling masonry. A fire, which broke out after the earthquake, destroyed more of the town, but was contained by a company of U.S. Marines who had arrived immediately to help maintain order. The earthquake, coinciding with the movement for architectural reform, is credited with giving the town its unified Spanish character; during the rebuilding Hoffman and Chase pushed for new structures to be in a Spanish style. The most famous of these was the Spanish-Moorish style County Courthouse, completed in 1929, "the loveliest in the United States."
One of the only voices opposing the unification of architectural style was newspaper publisher and future Senator Thomas Storke, who later changed his mind, saying that his former opposition was due to his belief that such compulsion infringed on the constitutional rights of property owners. Storke in 1932 created the city's main newspaper for the next 74 years, the News-Press, by winning a libel suit against his rival Reginald Fernald, and absorbing that publisher's Morning Press into his Daily News.
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